Wordfest 25@25: Marina Endicott & Guy Gavriel Kay

Last week, Lawrence Hill passed the daisy to Guy Gavriel Kay. He has asked Marina Endicott to be his virtual stage-mate.

The 60-minute conversation, hosted by Shelley Youngblut, will start at 7:00 PM MT. (The pre-show will begin at 6:50 PM MT.) And as we do every Tuesday, we'll be revealing the names of the next two authors in the 25@25 Daisy Chain at the end of the show, making you the first to know!

Pass or ticket holders will be automatically registered for this event, with access to the live stream on Wordfest.com, as well as the option of watching it on demand whenever works for you. Look for our unique Digital Doggie Bag after the event with all the links, goodies and references from the conversation.

About Guy Gavriel Kay

Guy Gavriel Kay is the international bestselling author of many novels and a book of poetry. He has been awarded the International Goliardos Prize for his work in literature of the fantastic and won the World Fantasy Award for Ysabel in 2008. In 2014, Kay was named to the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honor. His work has been translated into more than 25 languages.

About A Brightness Long Ago

 “Living, as we are, in a world that seems beyond the capacity for shock, A Brightness Long Ago is a beautifully told counterpoint.” – The Globe and Mail

From the internationally bestselling author of Tigana and The Lions of Al-Rassan comes a masterful new novel set in a vivid world evoking early Renaissance Italy and offering an extraordinary cast of characters whose lives come together through destiny, love, and ambition.

In a chamber overlooking the nighttime waterways of a maritime city, a man recalls his youth and the people who shaped his life. Danio Cerra's intelligence won him entry to a renowned school even though he was only the son of a tailor. He took service at the court of a count—and soon learned why that man was known as the Beast.

Danio's fate changed the moment he recognized Adria Ripoli as she entered the Beast's chambers one autumn night, intending to kill. Born to power, Adria had chosen, instead of a life of comfort, one of danger—and freedom—which is how she encounters Danio in a perilous time and place.

Unforgettable figures share the unfolding story. Among them: a healer determined to defy her expected lot; a charming, frivolous son of immense wealth; a powerful religious leader more decadent than devout; and, affecting all these lives and many more, two larger-than-life mercenary commanders, lifelong adversaries, whose rivalry puts a world in the balance.

A Brightness Long Ago offers both compelling drama and deeply moving reflections on the nature of memory, the choices we make in life, and the role played by the turning of Fortune's wheel. 

About Marina Endicott

Marina Endicott’s Good to a Fault was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and CBC Radio’s Canada Reads, and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her next book, The Little Shadows, was short-listed for the Governor General’s award and long-listed for the Giller Prize, as was Close to Hugh. Her latest, The Difference (published in the US as The Voyage of the Morning Light), won the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton book award and the City of Dartmouth fiction prize. She teaches creative writing at the University of Alberta, Humber Writing School, and the Banff Centre for the Arts.

About The Difference

WINNER OF THE 2020 ROBERT KROETSCH CITY OF EDMONTON BOOK PRIZE

“Marina Endicott allows her characters to exist without being afraid of their (and our) moral dilemmas and failures, or the gap between our intentions and our understanding. She also writes about goodness so well—so beautifully and joyfully. . . . I feel as if I could close my eyes and still be at sea with these characters. A wonderful, brilliant book.” – Madeleine Thien, Giller Prize-winning author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

The Difference is a breathtaking tour-de-force by one of Canada’s most celebrated authors, a writer with the astonishing ability to bring a past world to vivid life while revealing the moral complexity of our own. What is the difference between ourselves and other humans? Between human and animal? Where does that difference persist in our minds? These are the questions Marina Endicott explores in this sweeping novel set on the Morning Light, a ship from Nova Scotia sailing the South Pacific in 1912.

Thea and Kay are half-sisters, separated in age by more than a decade. After the death of their stern father, head of a residential school in western Canada, the elder sister, Thea, returns east for her long-awaited marriage to the captain of the ship. She cannot abandon her younger sister, so Kay joins her, and together they embark on fateful voyage around the world. Taking inspiration from the true story of a small boy who was brought on board a Canadian sailing ship in the South Seas, Endicott shows us a vanished world in all its wildness and wonder, and its darkness, prejudice, and difficulty too.

Buy Their Books

A Brightness Long Ago

Owl's Nest Books | Shelf Life Books

The Difference

Owl's Nest Books | Shelf Life Books

Buy Their Recommended Books

To continue with the generosity that is at the heart of the Daisy Chain concept – and help promote the work of authors whose book events have been affected by COVID-19 – we asked the 25@25 authors to highlight a book published in 2020 that they would encourage you to read. These books will be available at Owl's Nest and Shelf Life in Calgary. If you buy five or more of the 25@25 authors’ featured books (either their current title or their backlist) or their recommended books, you will receive a 25% discount. Please contact the booksellers for more details about the discount.

Buy Marina Endicott’s Recommended Book: A Russian Sister by Caroline Adderson

“A Russian Sister is remarkably beautiful. Anton Chekhov’s sister Masha was his lifelong amanuensis and companion, and Caroline Adderson’s working of their lives and their friend Lika’s life into Chekhov’s play Seagull is Chekhovian itself: clear, sensitive, gorgeously Russian and entirely rewarding to read. The creation of character is the best part of this book, even better than Adderson’s immaculate recreation of period and community and the Russian landscape and art and life—all of which Adderson writes about with the kind of authority a reader revels in. A wonderful by-product of this book is the joy of discovering so much more about Chekhov. All his people are here, his difficult family and ferocious friends, and his long and perilous journey to Sakhalin; Adderson’s meticulous research gives the rock-solid sense that this is how their lives really were. When I got to the end, I cried my eyes out, for the tragedy of everything and because I did not want it to be over. Like Chekhov’s own stories, this book is—as Anton and Masha's lives were—painful and unfair and inevitable, and an exquisite and deeply satisfying read.” 

Owl's Nest Books | Shelf Life Books

Buy Guy Gavriel Kay’s Recommended Book:  Au Revoir, Tristesse: Lessons in Happiness from French Literature by Viv Groskop

“I reread all the time, I am fascinated by how rereading a book works to illuminate who we were when we read and loved (or didn't love!) a book long ago. Will our reaction be the same? Wildly different? Slightly shifted? I like books about this, too. So Viv Groskop's Au Revoir, Tristesse was down my street, as she rereads and discusses the French Great Books she read young, and now re-assesses, both the books and herself. Here’s the very first sentence … ‘There is one very obvious life lesson the French want to teach us: If you want to be happy, it’s best to be French. If you want to lead the ideal kind of life, then that life is to be found in France’.

She’s funny, and sharp, and resistance was futile.”

Owl's Nest Books | Shelf Life Books

Curiouser?

Article:

• Proust Questionnaire: Guy Gavriel Kay reveals his biggest regret, favourite painter and his idea of perfect happiness – The Next Chapter, CBC

Reviews:

• “Guy Gavriel Kay maintains dynamic equilibrium in new novel” – The Star
• “Book Review: The Difference by Marina Endicott” – The Star Phoenix
• “A Novel That Unfolds in a Day, and Other Historical Fiction” – The New York Times Book Review